When I was a kid, we always had New Year's (read: Christmas) decorations (the maximum that wouldn't be out of place in a mostly Muslim country) on a small park in my neighborhood. One year they never appeared, and people were enraged.

The guy the city hired every year had a mob in front of his door. People's letters to the authorities got no answer, so suddenly he apparently became their contact person. I was buying snacks in a nearby shop. I went out when I heard people shouting. They were shouting accusations at a guy who must have just appeared before his door because he was wearing pajamas in that cold weather.

"You Islamists will ruin this country! [0]

Happy with what you did? My children actually cried!"

and so on.

He calmly answered: "This is something I did on my own. This year I got a cancer diagnosis, so I didn't have the motivation. Sorry!"

Him feeling the need to apologize always comes to my mind when I see the toxic comments on their unpaid work that the open source maintainers feel that they need to respond to.

[0]: Well, they did ruin the country. But that's another story.

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dmos62 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That sounds almost surreal. Pretty wild how my model of society doesn't account for this.

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jltsiren 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The society is built on informal expectations like that. People assume that things will go on as before, and they will start relying on it. They assume that for every thing they rely on, there is a bureaucrat somewhere responsible for making it happen. But unless you are that bureaucrat yourself, you probably don't need to be aware of the specifics.

Many things in the society depend on volunteer work. Open source software is unusual due to the scale of it. In other parts of the society, when many people depend on the work of a few, some corporate or government bureaucrat will usually assume responsibility. But in open source software, the few are often still volunteers without any formal responsibilities.

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Ferret7446 7 hours ago | parent [-]

As a non Christian, I feel that Christianity and similar religions did much to counter such harmful innate human tendencies (promoting charity, forgiveness, humility, etc) and the reason why Western societies have been so successful. The trend toward secularism could also explain their recent decline.

	▲	4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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FinnLobsien 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A good way to understand how much we thanklessly rely on some professions, Google pictures of any garbage disposal strike

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dmos62 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Garbage disposal and oss is an amusing comparison.

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GodelNumbering 8 hours ago | parent [-]

yes, one of them is paid.

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Ferret7446 7 hours ago | parent [-]

There are plenty of devs paid to do FOSS, either as a tech company employee or through patron systems

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		[deleted]

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e4325f 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Please can we have the other story?

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lostlogin 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What country was this?

	▲	egeozcan 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Istanbul / Turkey. Plus code for the park: 326F+73J Beşiktaş, İstanbul, Türkiye

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watwut 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To me it sounds like people assumed the guy skipped christmas decorations for fundamentalist religous reasons. And then projected all their fears and anger on him. Like, this was not reaction to missing decorations. It was fear of fundamentalism taking over and not wanting to cede your little turf.

And I think he was apologizing to placate angry crowd, not necessary because genuine guilt.